Kenshi

Lo-Fi Games spent twelve years building this squad-based open-world RPG, and the result is uncompromising in a way almost nothing commercial is. There is no plot, no quest log, no chosen one, and no scaling - the world is a fixed, brutally uneven place, and if you walk the wrong direction in the first hour something will break your legs and sell you. You start as one nobody with no skills, and skills only rise through use, so a swordsman becomes competent by nearly dying repeatedly. Limbs are lost permanently and replaced with prosthetics. Recruits join, bases can be built anywhere and defended against factions who genuinely siege them, and the economy of the whole map runs whether you are watching or not. Its presentation is dated and its interface is difficult, and neither is really the point. What it offers is emergent narrative of a kind scripted games cannot produce - most Kenshi stories are about a slow, humiliating recovery from a disaster nobody wrote.